PLANE'S FINAL MINUTES: 'RAISE THE NOSE'

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Tape-recorded conversations from the cockpit of the Japan Air Lines jumbo jet that crashed last week give no indication that the pilot was ever aware that much of the plane's vertical tail was missing.

According to transcripts of the tapes, made public tonight by the Japanese Transport Ministry, the pilot reported that the plane's hydraulic systems were ''gone,'' indicating there was no power to move wing flaps, rudders and other parts that control direction.

Other crew members reported a few minutes later that a luggage storage area had ''fallen down'' in the back of the Boeing 747 and that a rear right door was broken.

But if the crew recognized the extent of the damage, it was not clear from the transcripts made public tonight.

Evidence indicates that the vertical stabilizer and rudders blew apart soon after the jet, Japan Air Lines Flight 123, left Tokyo for Osaka on Aug. 12. After more than 30 minutes of wild circling, the plane crashed far off course in mountains northwest of Tokyo.

It was the worst single-plane disaster in history, killing 520 people. Two women and two girls were found alive in the wreckage.

Some Lived for a While

Other passengers and crew members lived for a while, but died of injuries while waiting for rescue teams. It took military and police crews more than 14 hours to reach the principal site of wreckage on Mount Osutaka in Gumma Prefecture.

In a televised interview today, one survivor, Keiko Kawakami, 12 years old, said her father, Eiji, and a younger sister, Sakiko, had not died right away and that she had talked to them. But after a period of silence, Keiko said, she reached over and touched her father's hand. It was cold, she said.

The cockpit voice recorder taped conversations from the last 32 minutes and 43 seconds of the flight, but the transcripts made public tonight did not include everything that was said.

Officials asserted that some gaps were the result of indistinct voices on the tapes. Last week the Transport Minister, Tokuo Yamashita, said his agency would not make public any conversations that he called ''private.''

In addition, the transcripts excluded the plane's communications with flight controllers at Haneda Airport in Tokyo and with an air station in suburban Tokorozawa. Transcripts of some of those exchanges were made public by the Transport Ministry last week.

Hydraulic Pressure Failure

In the transcripts made public tonight, the pilot, Capt. Masami Takahama, said one minute and five seconds after the tape started that hydraulic pressure was falling.

About a minute later, at 2:17 on the tape, he reported, ''All hydro gone.''

The recording reflected a desperate attempt by the crew to control the plane and to muster enough engine power to clear mountains and avoid a crash. Much of the tape is filled with maneuvering instructions such as ''raise the nose,'' ''lower the nose,'' ''up power'' and ''gear down,'' referring to the lowering of landing gear as Flight 123 tried to return to Haneda.

Ministry officials said the crew's voices were calm throughout, although a tone of heightened urgency grew evident toward the end.

At no point did the pilot say explicitly to his crew that the plane was out of control - something he reported several times to controllers on the ground.

Nine seconds later, the sound of ground contact could be heard. Two seconds after that came the crash.

It is not clear what time the tape recording began, but it is obvious that trouble had already started.

Captain Takahama or his co-pilot, Yutaka Sasaki, told flight controllers of an emergency at 6:25 P.M., 13 minutes after the plane left Haneda. One survivor, an off-duty assistant purser named Yumi Ochiai, said that at 6:25 she heard a ''loud bang'' above her seat toward the rear of the plane.

The time of the crash is not clear. The Transport Ministry said last week that the jet disappeared from Haneda radar screens at 6:57 P.M., but Japan Air Lines reported that Tokorozawa radar tracked it until 7:04.

Thus the tape probably began between 6:25 and 6:32.

When they found the voice recorder two days after the crash, search teams also retrieved the flight recorder, which had computer data that might provide more precise information about the plane's course.

In the segments of cockpit dialogue made public, there seems to be little that would help investigators determine the cause of the crash.

One widely discussed theory is that pressurized cabin air may have burst through cracks in the rear pressure bulkhead, rushing into the hollow vertical tail fin and exploding it. At least 30 fragments from the tail were found, most of them in waters directly below Flight 123's charted course along Honshu's southern coast.

But a senior Japan Air Lines official said today that he believed the initial damage to the fin had come from some external force.

''A gust or some other strong pressure from outside broke the vertical tail fin first,'' said Hiroaki Kono, director of the airline's maintenance division. ''Then at the same time, or soon after, the pressure bulkhead was destroyed.''

The transcripts made public tonight suggest that the crew was unaware of any of this.

A version of this article appears in print on August 20, 1985, on Page A00003 of the National edition with the headline: PLANE'S FINAL MINUTES: 'RAISE THE NOSE'. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe